Byakuya's Birthday Niceties Finding Byakuya
by ichkak
Summary: Set 2 years after the war ends. This is just a stupid bit of 'stuff' that wanted me to write it. Poor old Byakuya is suffering the Birthday blues until Ichigo turns it around - friendship only no relationships are implied. Meant to be funny -well I lauged


Byakuya's Birthday Niceties - Finding Byakuya.

In the UK legal drinking age is 18. But this is Japan we are talking about and I have no idea what the age is there! This is intended to be a (VERY) light hearted after my other 'Byakuya's Birthday' story which is _not_. Poor old Byakuya is suffering the Birthday blues until Ichigo turns it around - friendship only no relationship is implied.

Yaoi is only implied and done as a prank but if you one of 'those' people don't even waste your effort reading this or sending stupid comments. Please get a life!

This is just a stupid bit of 'stuff' that wanted me to write it. An indecent Byakuya is snoozing on my bed sleeping off the hangover this story produced. No I'd never take advantage of him in that situation...okay does handcuffs and fluffy willy socks count?

* * *

"Taicho may I go now?" Renji did his stiff waist bow towards his captain who sat quietly processing the paperwork on his desk.

"It is early."

"I know sir...But..."

"Spit it out!"

"With it being New Year tonight sir."

"There is a party?"

"Hai."

"Very well. You may leave." Renji bowed low to hide the smile across his face and started towards the door. "But." Renji halted in his tracks, he should have known there would be a catch. "You will make up the lost time tomorrow."

"But its a holiday sir!"

"Paperwork does not have a holiday." Byakuya said quietly and continued signing his name.

"Hai Taicho." Renji bowed again albeit a little more subdued this time.

Byakuya heard the doors closing to the outer office and the sounds of his men chirping as they wandered through the courtyards beneath his window. They sounded...happy.

He sighed heavily and let his brush drop from his grip as he choked back a hated sob that had threatened to leave him all day. Today. He hated this day. Every year it was the same.

Nothing strikes a widower like a New Year does. Cries of happiness and wishes for a better year cannot be answered. What they wish for personally, could never happen.

Add to that abundance of melancholy, a dose of birthday, signalling yet another year older than the hundreds you already were and it rang the chimes of doom that you'd spend another resoundingly long year alone again. Years and years, or in the case of a Shinigami, decades and centuries of being alone were his future; his penance for grabbing those five years of joy. Byakuya hated life and nearly everyone in it. There was no reason to feel that joy others had, no one to share his life with nor anyone who _wanted_ to share it with him.

"Damn you." Byakuya stood abruptly from his chair scrubbing at his eyes. He should not have indulged himself in painful memories and allowed the crack in his armour to appear. He cursed his stupidity and leant both hands on the open window sill and stared outward and upward at the star filled night. The courtyards and usually busy halls around him were silent except for the start of music playing in the distance where everyone had gathered to have a _good time_.

...

"Did you bring him?" Rukia looked around Renji for the sight of a tall dark haired man she called brother.

"No what I wanna to that for?" Renji scoffed swiping a drink from the tray on the table.

"Duh!" Rukia slugged her elbow into his guts causing the spray of drink to reach the others on the far side of the table. "One cos I asked you to."

"Rukia, no one wants your brother, _the_ stuck up git, to bring a downer on our night!" Renji scoffed and was pleased that others Ikkaku Madarame & Yumichika Ayasegawa were nodding keenly.

"TWO!" Rukia said loudly to get her point across. "Because, he always spends tonight alone."

"Hello earth to Rukia." Renji knocked his knuckles on her head. "Because no one likes him!"

"I had a present for him." She said whining and wishing she'd gone to his office before coming here as she had previously planned.

"Oh where's mine then? What is this a Human tradition I haven't heard of?"

"No. Its called a birthday." The tutted at him although she knew that was unfair, Renji like herself had no idea of when her birthday really was having been orphans. "You did know, I told you."

"Oh." Renji looked sheepish a moment and that gave her ample excuse to slug him again on the jaw.

"You forgot. You didn't even wish him a Happy Birthday? Anyone?" Rukia looked around the table at the masses of embarrassed faces.

Ichigo chose that moment to arrive with an all singing and dancing grin plastered across his face and throw several bottles of sake down on the table breaking the silence with a mighty cheer from the others. Rukia however knew the smile.

"Alright, what's up?" She asked as he sat and swigged down the hot alcoholic fluid he'd spilt into his clay cup.

"I've been dead, right for what? Two years since the end of the war?" She nodded. "I hate this place and I haven't yet worked out how to get away from it. Same in same out day after day. So boring."

"Ichigo old mate hows your old man?" Ichigo's scowl appeared the moment the words had left Shuhei's mouth.

"How the fuck would I know, I've been stuck here with you lot!" The table rattled as he stood and slammed his hands down on the table. "Boring bunch of fuckers! Drink drink drink!" He stared at them all. "Is that all we do? Follow orders during the day and then drink to oblivion every night?"

"Yeah!" A cheerful chorus echoed up from the tables.

"Oh whadup wid woo?" Rangiku pinched his cheek and shook his angry looking face. "Ave a drink!" She thrust his cup back into his hand and pushed him by his shoulder back down to his seat. "Course we drink a lot. We like it!" She grinned and shrugged. Really what else was there to their life?

Rukia crossed her arms looking thoughtful at the boy and sighed. This really was all her fault. He shouldn't be here. In human years he was only 18 and he should have been enjoying his life, not dead because of some war she had dragged him into.

"Here." She took hold of his hand and dragged him away from the table.

"Oh lookie! Rukia and Ichigo sitting in a tree..." They heard the laughing echoing behind them as they left the hall.

"Bunch of fuckers." Ichigo tutted. "Where are we going?" He let her drag him away knowing all too well that putting up a fight was pointless.

"To find my brother."

"What!" Ichigo stopped in his tracks.

"What is it with all of you lot and my brother?"

"Now you don't normally make me go find him." Ichigo had began to back away towards the hall preferring a slow drunk night to fighting the cool wrath of one Kuchiki Heir. "You know how he feels about me." Yeah she did, he hated the sight of him; too busy worrying about relationships that were purely fabricated.

"He always spends his evenings alone."

"Yeah by choice." Ichigo couldn't hide the sulk from his voice.

"Really?" She questioned. "Tonight, would you want to be alone?"

"Its New Year. I hate New Year."

"You do?"

"Yeah." He tried stuffing his hands down his pockets but remembered he couldn't even do that any more without any western clothes.

"Well imagine it was your birthday as well?"

"Oh...It is?" Well Ichigo knew, where he'd want to be if that were the case.

"It is."

"With a dead wife and your only family off somewhere else enjoying themselves." He had a shot of clarity and she smiled at him. Someone understood. But then of course Ichigo knew loss. He nodded and stood circling where he stood. "Well, you take his offices and mansion. I'll do the..." He looked thoughtfully away towards the gloomy presence of 'that' hill where he'd fought the man for the first time. "Meet up back in the bar in an hour?"

Rukia nodded and they disappeared into wave of shunpo.

...

Rukia found the office empty. A forgotten brush lay carelessly dripping on a document and the window was left open, doors unlocked and lights on. Very unlike Byakuya.

...

Ichigo was following his nose. It was true that he still sucked at sensing out reiatsu even with all the training he had had since his death, but he had a hunch and he choose to follow it.

The town flew by beneath his feet and he allowed himself a moment to wonder how no shinigami collided with anyone else or rather large immovable objects. But soon his feet slowed and he stepped foot onto the dusty soil. Thankfully he had avoided any body rearraging objects in the process.

...

Rukia gasped at the mess of Byakuya's room. The entire place looked as if a hurricane had hit it and a rather sharp pointy bladed one at that. The servant kneeling picking up shards of glass bowed at her appearance.

"Where is the master?"

"He left maam."

"Hisana's picture?" Rukia bent to the torn picture that had been damaged by the glass breaking as it hit the ground. "What happened in here?"

"The master was angry."

"But..." Rukia thumbed the picture and shook her head. Everyone had their point of breaking. Everyone had a level to which they could go before all patience and tolerance left them, where life just became too much. What on earth had tipped him over the edge?

"The elders were seeking him out and he refused to see them. They insisted. We could all hear the row maam, all hear the master shouting at them that he would not agree."

"Agree?"

"His age maam... The elders said it was something he could no longer put off. All Kuchiki's must be married by or on the year of their 250th birthday."

...

"In two years alone, I lost my wife, lost my grandfather, became Taicho and head of the family."

"But found Rukia." Ichigo handed the bottle back and watched the long extended neck of Byakuya as he threw his head back and started to drink from the bottle.

"How do you do that Kurosaki? How do you just see so much in people? How do you know there is something inside them that's worthy of your time?" _I used to see a lot more than I do now._

"I dunno, I just do."

"You even did it with the Arrancar. There truly has never been another person like you in the history of Soul Society. Now me, take me for instance. All I see is the rot and fifth."

"You see that in me?" _Doh! Stupid isn't that his usual remark that he was trash?_

"Bah. It is the drink clouding my judgement. This is not my first bottle."

"I guessed that much."

"I'm tired." He put the bottle down with a thunk realising he had had enough of it.

"Come on home time. Rukia would kill me I didn't go with you. You in no state to go wandering home alone." Ichigo pulled the noble to his feet.

"And by what do you base that judgement?"

"Well." Ichigo scratched the back of his head. "You are not acting like yourself."

"No? Not the insufferable bastard? Not the one who will ruin everyone's evening if I turn up? Not the one who wants more than anything to just not be hated and be so alone for one night. Just one night." Byakuya suddenly looked very sober. "I am not drunk _Ichigo_. I am liberated from the bindings of my bloody god damn suffocating upbringing. This hill, this is judgement hill... The hill that I seem to have so many epiphanies on." Ichigo watched the man turn to face the lights of the celebrations below. "Tonight I am 250 years old and built up enough wisdom to see my mistakes...To feel the pains I carry and know how much I hold onto them of my own choice...but I am tired. Very tired of doing so." His head dropped and a regal hand covered his eyes that leaked of their own accord and refused to bow to his demands that they stop.

Ichigo had never been one for sorting out the emotional problems of others he had enough of his own to deal with. But what he did know is that when he felt this bad, the one thing that always helped was a hug. So he nervously stepped forward and awkwardly put his arms around the man's shaking shoulders and stiffly held his arms around a strangely compliant noble.

...

"Renji!" Rukia ran breathlessly into the bar and slammed the drink from his hand from the table. "This is bad really bad, I need your help!"

"Hey wait on a minute!" Renji mourned the loss of his drink and stared at the strange photo Rukia was holding out in front of him. "What's tha?"

"My sister."

"Rukia, have you lost it? The girls dead, I know that's sad but... Come and have a drink."

"Baka! This is Byakuya's most prized possession. He worships this photo!"

"Its just a photo Rukia."

"If this was your... your damn orange teddy and you deliberately damaged it in a fit of rage, what would you want me to think?"

"That I don't have an orange teddy Rukia!" He laughed embarrassed as the others began to look and laugh, he could hear them all chuckling the words 'Teddy' and 'Orange hey?' 'Bet he calls it Strawberry!' under their breaths.

"That you'd lost it you fool! Gone gaga! He's missing. MY BROTHER IS MISSING!" Renji only then noticed that Rukia, the most hardest of bitches in the entire world looked scared. "He wrecked his room, smashed the frame this was in and ran. Byakuya RAN!"

The room seemed suddenly aware that Byakuya Kuchiki, the most feared of all the captains was missing and not only that – he was _emotionally unstable_. Fear erupted from a few lower ranked members and the smell proved just how 'real' their emissions were. A sane 6th Captain was formidable, what in Hell's name would a loose cannon one look like?

"Did he still have his sword?" A frightened voice came from the crowd.

"Right, form teams..." Hitsugaya stood on the table taking charge.

...

"Hey where'd everyone go?" Ichigo slumped his shoulders as he entered the empty building that had previously been a throng of drunks and misfits. The music echoed away quietly in the background to itself and glasses sat unfinished. A few seats and tables were knocked over and it looked like they had all vacated in a hurry.

"Oh Karaoke!" Ichigo looked at Byakuya as if he was a Martian. Did he just hear the man squeal? He watched dumbfounded as the man with fluttering robes behind him, ran to the machine and flipped through the selections. He looked up gleefully smiling. _Yes that's smiling_. Ichigo decided rubbing his eyes. The noble beckoned him over. "Ichigo-san, come and join me!" His deep voice was still there, the rumble that it was, vibrated through Ichigo's chest as usual but it just didn't add up with the gleeful tone. Alongside his disbelief the cheesiest song ever began to billow out from the speakers.

"No fucking way!" Ichigo shook his head. _No fucking way was he doing this!_ He sighed taking the microphone extended out towards him and he looked to the screen of words ready to start singing. "I ain't being Olivia Newton John!" He grunted before launching grimicing but singing none the less, "Summer lovin' had me a blast!" From the screen.

"Summer lovin' happened so fast!" Byakuya didn't need to read the words off the screen and he took no secret pleasure in Ichigo's scowling compliance.

"I met a girl crazy for me." Ichigo all but bared his teeth in a growl at the way Byakuya bopped his head and looked like the cat that got the cream. So much for the sob story on the hill then. Just how did he get himself into this? Now Ichigo was sure he was the drunk one and imagining it all. There was no way this was THE Byakuya Kuchiki beside him singing in that high pitched voice; Bee Gees move over!

"Met a boy cute as can be." Byakuya slid an arm around Ichigo's shoulders and sang looking into his eyes as they both sang "Summer days driftin' away, to uh-oh those summer nights."

Ichigo groaned as he turned at the sound of others in the room laughing and pointing at him. " "Found 'em!" Echoed along the lines of entering Death Gods.

"Uh Well-a well-a well-a huh!" They all made it sound like a football chant and at least that made Ichigo at last begin to laugh.

Renji jumped onto a table with Shuhei. "Tell me more, tell me more!" They called out laughing.

"Did you get very far?" Ishida Uryuu sang and more than Ichigo did a double take at that one. _He sings huh?_

Rukia, Nanoe & Rangiku took this as their chance and holding hair brushes for microphones sang out, "Tell me more, tell me more!" So very out of tune but giggling all the way. "Like does he have a car?" Rukia gleefully laughed her way through.

The whole room now filling nicely fell into a chorus of " Uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh."

Leading Ichigo neatly into his next surprisingly tuneful line to which he even added a one armed swimming motion.

"She swam by me, she got a cramp."

"He ran by me, got my suit damp." Byakuya playfully pushed Ichigo and shook his head wagging a finger at him in such a camp way.

"I saved her life, she nearly drowned." Ichigo sang but thumped Byakuya for the shove earlier.

"He showed off, splashing around." Byakuya retorted with a jab of his elbows leaving Ichigo doubled up holding his abused ribs as they both sang together. "Summer sun, some thing's begun, but uh-oh those summer nights."

The room shook as everyone yelled out "Uh well-a well-a well-a huh!"

Hair brushes at the ready again, Rukia, Nanoe & Rangiku whined painfully "Tell me more, tell me more!"

"Was it love at first sight?" Rangiku tickled under Ichigo's chin and stood between the two men drawing them dangerously close to her breasts and leaving both men looking at each other in panic.

Renji & Shuhei feeling a little left out threw in a very loud and drunk "Tell me more, tell me more!"

But only to be upstaged completely by the huge bulk of Kenpachi sitting himself on the bar, broken glass in his backside not withstanding and singing with his toothy and evil smirk. "Did she put up a fight?" And adding a dark and sinister chuckle at the end.

The room rang out again with their loud boom of "Uh-huh-uh-huh-uh-huh-uh-huh!" All eyes looked to Ichigo for his part as he tried to withdraw his head away from between Rangiku's breasts and instead his singing sounded rather muffled. "Took her bowling in the arcade."

Byakuya was looking far too please that it wasn't his head between those two potentially fatal lumps of female flesh and added, "We went strolling, drank lemonade!" To which Renji pressed a drink into his Captains hand and forced the highly flammable and lethal liquid down his throat.

Ichigo relieved his head just in enough time to see Byakuya chocking and turning bright red and to add with rather suggestive gestures, "We made out under the dock!" To much whooping and raising of glasses.

It seemed suitable that the Prim face of Byakuya retorted with much hilarity with, "We stayed out 'till ten o'clock!" He looked to Ichigo and both bellowed out, with Byakuya now staggering as the affects of Renji's drink started to work its magic from his feet up. "Summer fling, don't mean a thing, but uh-oh those summer nights!"

"Uh well-a well-a well-a huh." Everyone sang as Mrs Big Breasts tried to drag Byakuya into the mounds of doom that were her breasts and he stumbled backwards away from her as the drink got to his knees and buckled underneath him. Leaving Ichigo and Rangiku laughing as he landed on the lap of Hitsugaya who'd chosen to sit by the speakers.

Renji and Shuhei grabbed an arm each of Ichigo as they chorused out tonelessly, "Tell me more, tell me more!" Leaving him unable to defend himself as he stuck his fingers in his ears.

" Tell me more, tell me more!" Rukia and Nanoe sang alone as Rangiku was loving the two tattooed men shoving Ichigo deeper between her boobs, leaving the orange teen waggling his legs comically.

The whole room erupted into true 50's grins and cheesy dancing as they rang out "Shoo-bop bop, shoo-bop bop, shoo-bop bop,shoo-bop bop, shoo-bop bop, shoo-bop bop, shoo-bop bop, YEAH!" cheering loudly as Ichigo freed himself, tripped over the cables and landed in a heap at Byakuya's feet who still sat on the scowling lap of the ice Captain. Ichigo reached up to grab hold of Byakuya to get himself back onto his feet just as Byakuya's turn came around to sing, "He got friendly, holding my hand!"

Not one to be outdone and because his previous gestures went down so well, Ichigo hauled the 6th Captain swiftly to his feet and pretended to hump his rear. "While she got friendly down in the sand."

Byakuya unsuccessfully tried to relieve himself but his legs weren't working and he could only hang limply from Ichigo's hold on his hips as he limply sang his line. "He was sweet, just turned eighteen."

Ichigo could hardly keep the laugh from his voice as he continued his abuse of Byakuya's rear adding with a leering grin to the others. "Well she was good you know what I mean!"

Ichigo and Byakuya flinched at the ear piercing "WOAH!" They soon retaliated together with their own painful rendition

"Summer heat, boy and girl meet, but uh-oh those SUMMER NIGHTS!" They realised they were way toooo early with the high pitched wail of summer nights but by now the room had disintegrated into mindless hysterics that if a hollow invasion happened at this moment not one of the shinigami present would be in any fit state to fight. They gave up giving into their own laughter and sinking onto the floor in the fits of giggles.

"Happy Birthday Byaboo." Ichigo threw an arm around his shoulders.

"Thank you." Byakuya grinned back and promptly passed out.

"WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY BROTHER!?" Rukia pounced on Ichigo him thumping him on the head.

"It wasn't me it was Renji!" He retorted ducking his head into the slumped figure of Byakuya. But funny enough when he looked up he saw a flash of red hair rushing out the exit closely followed by a flaming midget. He looked back down at the man he'd never once imagined would let him this close without a blade shoved into his body somewhere and chuckled as he drooled. He was glad that Byakuya had had a good birthday after all.


End file.
